Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
01:11:21 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:11:21] S0: So for the memory piece, you're not doing anything fancy. There's all these databases that are launching and okay. You're just using plain old memory and then- [01:11:28] S1: Here's a memory file with... [01:11:30] S0: Yeah. [01:11:30] S1: And what's so funny is, again, think about an EA. Man, I don't care what your system is as long as I don't forget things. You could have ugly Apple Notes, you could have the most beautiful Notion doc in the world. I don't care. It's none of my business. What is my business is that you get the job done right, and then I end up looking good. And so I just bring that same... I'm not a micromanager. I'm like a high bar manager. I have high expectations for outcomes and do not care how you get it done. So maybe that just translates into how I manage my OpenClaws. [01:12:05] S0: I love this. And it's just the metaphor of thinking about it from the perspective of an assistant that you hired. Are there other challenges you run into? Anything else that's just like, "Oh man, that was a huge problem." [01:12:15] S1: Yeah, there's a couple tips that I don't feel like people think about a lot. One is a Mac Mini does not have a screen. And I don't know how you manage your Mac Mini. If it's sitting on a desk and you plug in a monitor? [01:12:26] S0: Yeah, I plug in a different monitor and I have a dedicated keyboard and mouse for it. [01:12:29] S1: Okay. I'm going to change your life. [01:12:31] S0: Okay.
01:12:31 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:12:31] S0: Okay. [01:12:31] S1: Go into your Mac Mini settings and turn on screen sharing. So there's this mode called screen sharing mode. And then on your main laptop, if you are on the same WiFi, you can open up screen sharing and literally pull up the screen of your Mac Mini on your laptop. [01:12:50] S0: Whoa. [01:12:51] S1: Then you can update. [01:12:52] S0: You're going to save people so much money here. [01:12:53] S1: So much money. I'm plugging in things. We're running out of keyboards. I've got three of these. And actually that screen share that I showed where I was setting up another agent was not on this laptop. It was on the Mac Mini and I'm just screen shared into it. You don't need a monitor, you don't need a keyboard, you don't need anything. And then for the more technical folks out there, you can also turn in remote login, which allows you to get into the terminal of your Mac Mini on the same WiFi. So those, that has been life changing for me because I had Mac Minis in a monitor on my kitchen table for a really long time. [01:13:29] S0: Okay. Two questions. Do you need a monitor and keyboard, mouse to get it going or can you start that screen share somehow magically from the beginning? [01:13:37] S1: No, I would recommend a monitor, keyboard, mouse to get it going because you have to turn on the setting somehow.
01:13:37 · Claire Vo, Lenny Rachitsky
[01:13:37] S1: No, I would recommend a monitor, keyboard, mouse to get it going because you have to turn on the setting somehow. [01:13:42] S0: Yeah. Okay. That's what I was wondering. Okay, cool. So use what you have for your other computer to start and then you can get rid of that. Okay, that's amazing. For the remote login stuff, where do you turn that on where you could SSH into- [01:13:54] S1: Yeah, it's in settings. I think it's called remote login. We can put the link to the help- [01:13:59] S0: Okay. Okay. [01:13:59] S1: Article in the show notes. [01:14:01] S0: Sweet. Okay. [01:14:01] S1: And then it will just give you a one line. It's like SSH, your computer name at a IP address. As long as you're on the same WiFi, you can just right into it. [01:14:13] S0: Amazing. That is life changing indeed. Okay. What else? Any other pro-tips? Anything else you've run into?
01:14:19 · Claire Vo
[01:14:19] S1: I really like giving it email access. So I've had a lot of success using the Google Workspace ecosystem to have it communicate with me and communicate with the world. And so I say have an abundance mindset towards the email addresses that you give it access to. And again, treat it like an employee. So not only does Poly look at my calendar, draft some emails for me, coordinate my schedule, but when I had Howie, for example, my research assistant on the podcast, look at our analytics for YouTube, I had it just write a Google Doc and share it to me on its findings. Or I have it, every time we have a project document that opens, it goes in and reads it and puts in ideas that he thinks can make the document better. And so I do think there's this Gog tool that you will probably install during your OpenClaw install. It gives you kind of API access to Google Workspace. That has been very useful to me because again, I can just work with it like I would any other employee in Docs, in Sheets, in emails, and I find it very natural. The other tip that I would have is figure out a tasking system, not for you to the agent, but from the agent to you. So my task for the agent, they just keep this to do file with a bunch of checked off items. It's very loose. But sometimes we run into the limitations of the real world and I need to fax the doctor's office or I need to walk and do a return. Now, it could just remind me in text, but I'm probably going to forget that. And so I have my agent assign me Linear tickets for things that I need to do, not that it needs to do. And then that's in my project management system. I have tracker, we all agree on due dates. And so let your agent project manage your tasks as well.
01:16:24 · Lenny Rachitsky, Claire Vo
[01:16:24] S0: That is so funny. It's just like a sign of maybe where things go, where we are doing the bidding of the AI. [01:16:32] S1: I am just amped for the AI at this point. I'm just a vessel of Poly at this point. [01:16:39] S0: There's so many of the metaphors there. I think also, by the way, the reason it was called Clawdbot, I'm guessing is, like what makes this special is it gives hands to the AI versus just a chat where you talk, you can actually do stuff. That feels like a big unlock with this thing. [01:16:55] S1: Yeah. And behind it is a kind of coding harness named Pi. And so behind the scenes, it's something very similar to a Claude Code. It's something very similar to a Codex. It's a command line tool that writes and runs code and talks to you through an LLM. It just has some very interesting components to it that have changed the user experience to be, I think, much more delightful and much more customizable. [01:17:24] S0: Just like I think the fun of it is so important. I think people don't get just like you try it and it's actually fun. And you see all these people on social media talking about it, "I've never had more fun, even though I'm working harder than I've ever worked. I'm having so much fun." And I think products like this are part of the reason. It's just fun to use OpenClaw.
01:17:42 · Claire Vo
[01:17:42] S1: Yeah. And I'll give this tip to some of the big large language model providers out there and these broad consumer products like ChatGPT, like Claude is, I don't know if you've experienced this, you see, for example, working with ChatGPT and every new chat ends with, "If you want me to, I can tell you this mystery, like this next step." And you feel like you're being growth hacked into the next step, the next query, or Claude will say, "If I were you, the next steps would be bullet point one, two, and three." And it's sort of like this product experience that's very hardened to get you to engage with the chatbot. And my experience with OpenClaw is its closers are much nicer. Even if you look at that Howie example, he doesn't say, "If you want me to, I can write Al an email and make sure that you're prepped for this." He says, "This sounds like a fun podcast for you. Enjoy it. This sounds like a good one." When I'm talking, I was talking about getting the kids to a doctor's appointment recently and Finn said something like, "Hope oldest kid feels better." I was like, "I hope he feels better too. That's really nice." And you look at how it's prompted and it's just very human in how its identity has been crafted. And this is not magic. It's not a secret. It's literally in a file. You can go read it. But something about that system prompt is very effective at engagement without growth hacks, and that feels nice for somebody you're employing.